Bud Collins
Boston Globe
June 11, 1993

News item: Young scholar-athletes from throughout the world will be arriving in Newport and Kingston, RI next weekend for what promises to be a truly amateur and friendly event involving basketball, sailing, soccer, tennis and volleyball.

Will Dan Doyle be gored by his own oxymoron?

Can a man who has dared hyphenate the words “scholar” and “athlete”, joining them in a marriage more curious than Marilyn Monroe - Arthur Miller, get away with it?

Should the watch-charm state, Rhode Island, be apprehensive about the forthcoming invasion of 2,000 mixed-up kids - either scholars masquerading as athletes or athletes disguised as scholars?

Is the international sporting community to be disgraced because the scholar-athletes will also be signing in as amateurs- and meaning it?

These questions have been circulating for three years, since the concept- the World Scholar-Athlete Games - was floated by Doyle. The suspense will be lifted nine days hence as kids from 100 countries and 50 states descend on Newport and Kingston in an Olympian effort that defies some of the most cherished customs of the Olympic games. Like nationalism, shoe contracts and dream teams.

Not that they’ll all be aberrational characters called “scholar-athletes”. Musicians, writers, artists of all kinds are also in the teenage crowd that will make the World Games a 12-day (June 20-July 1) clambake that the Olympic revivalist Pierre deCoubertin might have savored.

It was Baron deCoubertin who played a starring role in the daydreams of ex-Worcester gym rat Daniel E. Doyle Jr. while he attended Tufts’ Fletcher School of Diplomacy a decade ago. “I thought a lot about the wonderful thing he’d done, but I’m not sure deCoubertin would be overjoyed by his Olympic games of today,” Doyle days.

How could he be? If ever the ideals of a worthwhile scheme were corrupted and contorted, it’s the Olympics. This doesn’t mean that the student games will replace the Olympics in our hearts or the halls of greed. Or that the TV networks are knocking on Doyle’s door.

But Doyle’s idea seems to run along similar lines as deCoubertin’s when the Frenchman sleeked up the old Greek model in 1896. That is: bring the youth of the world together to get to know one another through friendly competition and demonstrations of the arts.

Doyle and deCoubertin part company, however, on the lineups. Participants in the World Games are 16-19 in age, and must be honor roll students. They even have to be able to read and write, which may get Doyle, a former college coach, marked lousy in some jockly circles.

And - get this for good new-fashion heresy. No national teams or uniforms. No award ceremonies. The games will be just one big blend of everybody. Instead of chanting “USA! USA! USA!” puzzled jingoistic spectators may have to settle for “You! You! You!” Is Doyle on the level?

In the five sports - basketball, sailing, soccer, tennis, volleyball - teams will be a patchwork of a variety of countries. For instance, double partners in tennis, contested at the historic Newport Casino, are to come from different homelands. “The Games village at the University of Rhode Island,” say event commissioner, Wally Halas, “will be another mix. You’ll have homogenized living. We want kids from differing cultures to genuinely learn about one another.

“One day many of them will be leaders in their homelands, and the friendships they will make here will broaden them, help them.”

Amen to that.

Founding Daddy Doyle, 44, a thoughtful guy who played hoops for Bates and coached the Trinity (Conn.) varsity, now does his enlightened thinking as the Executive Director of the Institute for International Sport at URI. As the Games’ parent organization, the IIS promotes such contacts through games playing.

“It’s an A-to-Z proposition, Australia to Zambia,” Halas says, “and all sorts of countries in between like Burundi, Malaysia, the Seychelles to name a few off the usual path.”

Doyle, whose “Are You Watching, Adolph Rupp?” was a standout novel about basketball a couple of years ago, is “pleased we’ll have all sorts of poets and writers reading their stuff. We’re lucky that a lot of people are taken by the idea. We have 17 sponsors, some foundation and federal grants. We won’t lose money.”

Although the boys and girls are genuine amateurs, a couple of big-name old pros are involved. The sailing will be done in Narragansett Bay aboard Intrepid and stars and stripes, twelve-meter veterans of the America’s Cup wars.

Twelve nationalities in each crew? Enough to make even Captain Bligh mutiny.